6 eParticipation and Social Media Experiment

view on the system mainly targets on service creation and service editing features which are provided by the Administration component. In addition to these service administration features, a user with the Administrator role has amongst others the possibility to maintain service categories, administrate users, and change texts on the user interface.

Apollon Collaboration Platform Architecture

The APOLLON platform addresses the issue how partners can be brought together that are offering and seeking any kind of services that are ready for transnational projects regardless at which location they are based. Interestingly, this Marketplace platform concept matches very well the thematic domain network and represents a potentially attractive business model triggering and supporting transnational business opportunities for SMEs in Europe. Based on the results from the eManufacturing experiment, the whole project started to use this in order to ensure sustainability of the APOLLON thematic networks and cross-border services (see below).

This experiment focused on integrating software components and technologies into eMedia and eParticipation applications. A primary question was to test how integrated eMedia technologies can encourage community activities and eParticipation and what are the advantages, best practices and limitations of cross-border activities within the Living Lab network. The experiment was designed to cluster three running local Living Lab projects in three countries, in which social media are being used to stimulate and facilitate the participation of citizens: the Issy-les-Moulineaux Medialand in France, the Manchester Digital Living Lab in the United Kingdom and the Antwerp Museum of Modern Art in Belgium. In this experiment specific technologies and related services within each Living Lab were selected (3D technologies from French SMEs Navidis and Virdual, social media and community reporters programs from the UK NGO People’s Voice Media, context aware mobile application from the Belgian start-up AirGraffiti now named MuseUS), with the objective to adapt and integrate them with each other.

In France, the Digital Fort Use Case experiment tested an interactive multimedia trail on the History of the Fort of Issy, based on the reconstruction of the fort in 3D, augmented reality, geolocation, community reporting, QR codes and cross-media. Winning 3 national awards, the interactive trail has become a permanent cultural service offered by the city of Issy-les-Moulineaux, accounting for more than 3,000 users.

The Belgian pilot tested the impact and added value of a mobile 3D game application on youngsters’ museum perceptions and experience in a museum setting. The experiment indicated that youngsters overall experienced visiting a museum, rather than playing a game. This is an encouraging result for applications focusing on in-situ audience engagement with cultural heritage. The application is currently in beta testing. Release on the market (AppStore) is planned for 2012.

The English experiment worked with Manchester Art Gallery to evaluate the Decoding Art project, which allows visitors and citizens to obtain information about on-street public art works by scanning QR codes on their mobile phones. The testing sessions took place in April 2011 and were a success as they allowed Gallery staff to use Living Labs approaches to improving public services and engaging with citizens. The ideas from the sessions informed further development of the project. It also provided a baseline evaluation to use for comparison when IBBT's MuseUs application which was tested in the Gallery in November 2011.

Finally, the second French experiment replicated the Antwerp and Manchester scenarios, testing the MuseUs application at the French Museum of Playing Cards within the “Alice in playing cards’ land” exhibition. The purpose was to test people’s reactions to the use of mobile games when visiting an exhibition. We focused on the remediation of a number of issues that were the result of the MuseUs trials in Manchester (e.g. lack of progress indication in the application) and tested the software on tablet computers instead of Smartphones.

The experiment’s conclusions are on different levels: contextual factors, ecosystems, technical and organisational interoperability, lead market opportunities, and collaboration. Regarding contextual factors, the pilot evaluation highlighted the role of access to eMedia and

Mobile technology, as well as language barriers and copyright issues. For example, working with partners with different skills implies a pedagogical approach of assisting them in the use of new technologies. Also, future projects involving the usage of social media for sharing user generated content will need to be aware of copyright and IPR regulations. The piloting of eMedia solutions raised the question of IPR for solutions developed in combining two or more existing technologies. For future projects, IPR and related licenses (Copyright, Creative Commons) will need to be defined at the beginning of the project in order to let each partner decide what to put in the project and understand what they take out. Living Labs could assume a role to support hybrid models such as Creative Commons allowing copyright holders to share part of the knowledge generated in the project with a wider community. These factors have partly also been discussed in other pilots (e.g. Homecare and assisted living) and demonstrate that we need to be aware of human factors as well as business and regulatory conditions.

The pilot has identified some models of how to address the issue of maintaining a close connection with local ecosystems, by setting up forms of customer relations management. Much like the homecare pilot, SMEs working with living labs should define clear goals and clear value added of working with living labs on technical innovation. The pilot was also confronted with the issue of enlarging the ecosystem of involved partners., a situation which is expected to be common in this type of cross-border projects. The local living lab had an important role in this process as it succeeded in finding the required partner, thus demonstrating the way SMEs can benefit from working with living labs. However, additional measures must be taken to really get the new partners involved, such as making a budget reservation for new partners or for additional development costs, and encouraging the participation of SMEs that are able to quickly adapt to shifts in the scenario and are willing to develop solutions such as APIs that facilitate the integration with third party applications.

The pilot also faced interoperability issues: technical interoperability of partner’s technologies and harmonization of partners’ goals. Technical interoperability was achieved through collaboration of SMEs along the definition of the pilot scenario. This involved ad-hoc development to achieve a sufficient level of integration and to be useful to explore the interest of investing further resources to achieve a seamless integration. Future projects will need to evaluate to which extent partner’s technology is interoperable requiring SMEs to provide detailed technology descriptions before starting a pilot and planning early technology assessment meetings among technology partners. SMEs should be encouraged to develop APIs as this facilitates communication with third party technology providers.

Regarding lead market opportunities, APOLLON enabled partners to explore foreign markets and some partners benefited from APOLLON to redefine their business model and identify new business targets. Several partners are engaged in new European-level projects due to APOLLON. The pilot also focused on new business models for social media-based applications that require almost no investment by cultural institutions. Practical bottlenecks such as lack of travelling costs hindered SMEs to engage in meetings with clients, putting Living Labs in the position of SMEs “sales representative”. This again points to the crucial role of living labs –also in other pilots –and to the new set of skills and competencies these Living Labs should acquire compared with existing living labs in order to carry out their role in cross-border settings.

As concerns collaboration processes in the cross-border setting, the matchmaking between SMEs and living labs is to be considered as a fundamental step determining the success of collaboration between SMEs and living labs. When the Living Lab ecosystem is not adapted to the SMEs, opportunities are lost. The pilot presents interesting examples of mismatches which invite us to pay due attention to the problem of living labs skills and competences.